I acknowledge my lack of sophistication to a ruminating and aspirating beast.
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Hey, that’s a touchy subject. I’m trying to get my methane emissions under control.
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But Firenze is a different issue. Florence?
I love the way they pronounce Ta-An(ne) on the MRT, the American way.
I dont think non native speakers can have difficulty with Firenze.
In the beginning I had problems thinking Florence was in France because I only knew Firenze.
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What?
You heard me.
Lots of people can’t do the trill around the world. None of my immediate family could do it. I’m making sure my daughter would be able to do it by trilling every single r in the English language, not all the time of course.
That is a minor component of the word. They could still easily pronounce most of it.
Qingdao uses a mo’fing Q in it to say something that is closest to the CH sound.
My point is, Taipei’s romanisation is not because furreiner dumb in many ways that other cities have different names in different languages.
And one does not need to overpronounce words.
Is there a point?
The point is that the what words or part of words are nativized is pretty much ad hoc between English accents, and we all find the other accents are doing it wrong.
But that’s not the point of this topic.
I think it’s like if you are speaking Japanese and you pronounce the capital of England as London, that’s incorrect Japanese.
The correct Japanese pronounciation is Rondon, even though it sounds like you are taking the fucking piss…
The test I was taught on noticing the different “p” in “pie” vs “spy”.
Hang a loose piece of a paper right in front of your mouth – as close as you can so long as the paper is hanging loosely.
Say each word as naturally as you can. NOTE: You DO NOT want to enunciate them clearly. Doing so will change your pronunciation. You want to do this in as close to normal speech as you can.
With almost certainty, when you say “pie”, you will see the paper flutter as you are puffing out air with the “p”. That, we call in linguistics, an ‘aspirated’ “p”.
When you say “spy”, however, SO LONG AS YOU’RE NOT TRYING TO SUPER ENUNCIATE will not flutter. It is an ‘unaspirated’ (or ‘deaspirated’) “p”.
In normal speech for almost all native and fluent non-native English speakers, this pattern will hold out for “t” vs “st”, “k” vs “sk” (including ‘hard c’) and “p” vs “sp”
You can repeat this test for
“Top” vs “stop”
“Pot” vs “spot”, and
“Kate” vs “skate”
There is a similar distinction test for “b”, “d”, (hard) “g” vs “p”, “t”, and “k” (including hard “c”), but instead of testing for that puff of air, you feel your voice cords for "voiced"ness
“bot” vs “pot” vs “spot”
“dop” vs “top” vs “stop”
“gate” vs “Kate” vs “skate”
If you still can’t tell, I might be able to find a video out there somewhere demonstrating.
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Taiwanese: You must use our tones or we don’t understand you!
Taiwanese speaking English: Skips 1/2 the letters of the alphabet.
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That’s just the kind of cavalier approach to the minutiae of pronunciation that got German spies killed during the war — Scheveningse scheve schoenen, the crooked shoes of Scheveningen 
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Nearly 7 years in Taiwan and I’m still confused by locals casually pronouncing “shi, chi, zhi, shu” etc as “si, ci, zi, su” especially when someone tries to teach me a new word.
They completely mispronounce the words yet challenge us on something so tiny as incorrect tone 
Still on the lucky side though as my native language contains all those “shi chi zhi shu, si, ci, zi, su” sounds. I’ve heard it’s even more nightmare for those who don’t have these sounds in their native language…
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